Taggart Family Reunion

My family hasn’t had a family reunion for quite some time, probably because my dad’s side of the family is large, but my parents have decided that it had been way too long since we all got together so they are putting together one for this May. It’s no surprise then, that I would be asked to do the website for the event.

The goals for the website were pretty easy:

Have information about the event (date, location, event activities)

Have it be as simple as possible (right now its only 1 page)

Have the ability for people to sign up with the website.

See what I mean, easy and it wasn’t very long before I had a workable design draft up and running & some very liberal wireframes.

The Tech behind it

So for the actual technology and stuff behind the design, it’s really quite simple. It just a One page site built on WordPress. Now why did I use WordPress for a One page site? Well I chose it because not only am I familiar with it and how to develop for it, but also it allowed me to choose from a host of different plugins for the registration stuff.

The Registration Plugin

As for managing the registrations, I chose The Eventr plugin. The main reason for it was that it was easy to use and didn’t bloat the front end code when I installed it.

The Icons

One of my favorite parts of this project though, was getting to design the icons for the activity section. I wanted the page to have some personality related to my family / relatives, so I chose some more light-hearted topics. Plus, if nothing else, I just like the look of that steak and moustache icons.

Next Steps

So I have a couple of additional plans for the website when I get time in the next couple of days:

Add a “Registered People” page so other people can see who has registered already

Add a place for it to gather all the pictures taken during the trip into one place (probably flickr based, I’m thinking).

Well if you have any questions, comments, concerns, cool cat gif’s, just leave them in the comments below.

1 Comments

Thanks for laying everything out as you did. I really enjoyed the mustache icon, that was perfect, and fits in well being that mustaches are so popular right now.

Keep us posted on how well the site works out. I know family reunion sites are kind of new, but it would be really neat to see them take off. Thanks for sharing your experience creating a family reunion site.